Nehad Selaiha hails a Tunisian guest show at Al-Hanager Tunisian director Ezzeddine Gannoun literally stumbled upon theatre while playing football. He has always had a passion for soccer, as far back as he can remember, and at the youth centre which he frequented as a boy to indulge this passion, an exceptionally perspicacious superintendent made enrolling for any sport conditional upon taking part in one of the cultural activities provided by the centre. Music and poetry seemed too stationary for the young, physically restless Gannoun, and so he opted for theatre, starting a life-long association. One could write a long essay, maybe a whole dissertation, on the influence of football on the kind of theatre Gannoun eventually developed and labeled "al-masrah al-'udwi" (organic theatre). Like football, theatre in Gannoun's view, should be a popular 'game' accessible to everybody regardless of age, education or social class -- a game that passionately involves the audience at every step and which, while requiring rigorous training, strict discipline, the meticulous honing and refining of technical skills and continuous striving for fresh ones, allows the player, within its harsh parameters, almost limitless freedom for imaginative creativity. The influence of football can also be traced in Gannoun's unfailing preference for untraditional performance spaces and his impatience with the picture-frame stage. When he came to Cairo for the first time in 1988, in the course of the first Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre, he chose to stage his production -- Al-Dalia -- at Wikalat Al-Ghouri, making full use of the architectural properties and aesthetic features of the place and keeping the audience on the move, chasing after the actors, all the time. It was a physically demanding show for both the actors and spectators; the brutal conflict between the characters which kept them rushing from one spot and level of the building to another came across like an exciting match which kept you, literally, on your toes. Despite the crush, the sweat, the jostling and panting, Al-Dalia triggered a state of euphoria among the audience and their response was simply ecstatic. They say places carry the imprint of the people who live in them and continue to silently echo with their voices and feelings long after they depart. Every time I visit Wikalat Al-Ghouri, whatever the occasion, I always imagine I could glimpse, in the play of light and shadow on the walls or on the fountain in the middle, faint traces of that distant show. Another place Gannoun and his 'organic' company have made their own and continue to haunt with echoes and memories of an airy fabrication of theirs is Beit Al-Harrawi. Years after Al-Dalia, Gannoun brought over to Cairo his 2000 Al-Nawasi (Street Corners) and made it seem as if it had been born out of this ancient, beautiful Cairene house and could not exist anywhere else. Once more the audience were required to actively, physically follow the action, moving from the open courtyard into an adjacent room on the same level then out again. Every door, terrace and window was recreated into a forceful dramatic signifier and vehicle for human emotions so that long after one has forgotten the plot, or what the conflict was all about, one remembers the silhouette of an actress leaning against a door, or the face of another looking out of a window. The creation of memorable spaces, places which iconise in vivid, audio-visual terms significant personal and communal human experiences, is a talent Gannoun has developed over the years. I distinctly felt this when I watched his tempestuous Hob fi al-Kharif (Love in Autumn) in Amman some years ago. It was performed at the Royal Cultural Centre with its plush red seats and conventional Italian-box stage that nearly suffocated the passions which rage inside the characters from the beginning. These developed from intermittent violent sparks into roaring flames, suddenly materialising on the stage near the end in a real fire which, though meant as a concrete visual metaphor, caused a wave of panic in the auditorium. The whole place could go up in flames and the fault would not be Gannoun's; like a man driven, he wanted to create a memorable space, in this case, hell. And who else but Gannoun would dream of metaphorically recreating hell on a tame bourgeois stage? What saved the day was the fact that football had taught Gannoun how to exercise the utmost imaginative freedom in a rigidly limited space, even a stuffily bourgeois one, without overstepping the rules of the game, of which one is safety of course. Though almost uniformly used as a picture-frame stage, Al-Hanager space cannot, even far-fetchedly, be described as bourgeois. So, when the inimitable Hoda Wasfi (a real gem among Arab artistic directors, always on the lookout for fresh challenges and new stimulation for her fledgling artists) invited Gannoun to conduct a workshop there and give two performances of his latest show, the result had the effect of a stunning revelation. The demonstration which followed the ten-day workshop and consisted of brief, silent sketches, showed how finely tuned actors' bodies can become in the hands of an inspired artistic coach, as well as the vast range of sensitively-textured existential states and emotions the human body can express. What a longer spell in the care of Gannoun could produce was amply displayed by his 6-strong team of Tunisian actors a few days later. For close on an hour and a half, Leila No'man, Qisala Al-Nafti, Reem El-Hamruni, Helmi Al-Dreidi, Wahid Al-Agami and Mohamed Qurei' kept us spellbound as they displayed the vast expressive, poetic potential of the human body, even when kneeling or crawling, blindfold and knocking around in the dark and deprived of the use of its arms and hands. Raha'en, (Otages or Hostages), which opened in Tunis early this year, graced Al-Hanager three weeks ago, toured in Syria then came back to Alexandria to perform at its famous library on 7 May, is a play of and about our time, "a moment of reflection on all that is happening around us," in Gannoun's own words. The first scene, which proceeds like a quick series of flashing caricatures, features a bunch of travellers at a harbour, in some unspecified country, about to board a steamer: a small, elegant young woman lugging a suitcase twice her weight and almost her size; a hyperactive football fiend, not unlike the youthful Gannoun, in a flaming red sports suit who cannot keep still and goes through the motions of running while remaining stationary; a nervous, effeminate young man, quite attractive and palpably homosexual; a sinister tall woman in grey with an insane look in her eyes; and a sexy aspiring young actress in a flashy outfit talking seductively into a cell phone. In the following scene, which follows a momentary blackout, these characters are hurled onto the stage one by one, minus coats, bags, hats and other trappings, with their hands metaphorically tied behind their backs, as if by some mysterious force lurking in the wings. After stumbling around in terror for a bit, in the semi dark, moving mostly on their knees, or crawling and writhing on the floor, we learn that a group of unidentified terrorists, who speak a strange yet vaguely familiar, faintly comprehensible tongue, have captured them and intend to use them as bargaining counters in a bid to release some fellow 'freedom-fighters'. As the play proceeds, both the travellers and their invisible captors come under close scrutiny. The travellers are revealed as petty-minded, self- centered, morally flawed and politically naïve; but they are also deeply oppressed and mentally tortured people who wanted to escape their dreary reality, shed the burden of a painful, crippling past and seek a better future away from home. That for each 'home' means 'prison' becomes progressively clear, making the irony of their situation -- their fleeing one prison to fall into another, deadlier one -- all the more poignant. To present the argument of the captors, Gannoun introduces a sixth character halfway through, a man who claims he volunteered to negotiate with the terrorists for their release and ended up joining them as an extra hostage. For a few minutes, the stranger dissociates himself visually from the group, stands up while they kneel or sprawl around, moves his arms freely while theirs remain figuratively tied behind their backs, takes the black band off his eyes while they remain blindfold, and in a kind of enacted flashback impersonates the spokesman of the terrorists and reiterates their argument: what do you expect of cornered people who have been driven to the wall, deprived of everything, robbed of every hope, of both the past and the future, have been trampelled underfoot and had their noses rubbed into the dirt of the road? From such people should one expect mercy, respect for life or human rights? What do they know about all this? Have they ever been shown any? For a startling, spell-binding moment, but only a moment, the force of the argument seems to tip the balance in favour of the terrorists. When freedom and human dignity are ruthlessly sacrificed on the altar of a single, lawless global power (read the USA) which strives to control the destinies of people far and wide and, thug-like, spread its hegemony worldwide, what do you expect? Had he left it at that, Gannoun's Hostages would have turned into a fiery political denunciation of the indifference of the world and, especially, of ordinary Arab citizens to the 'holy' war waged by such groups as Hamas and its sisters -- a war which liberally offers martyrs and morally sanctions acts of violence against innocent civilians. That the anonymous civilian victims of such 'holy' wars are not wholly innocent, but could be charged with being silent colluders in the oppression of third world countries, indeed in their own oppression, and the displacement and exploitation of whole communities is implicitly posited. As a counter argument, the hostages have nothing to offer but a fervent plea for the right to live, a desperate, heart-rending clinging to life despite the facts of their oppression both in their country and within their own families, their pathetic human frailty, deep existential pain, frustrated dreams and impossible hopes. Faced with the prospect of imminent, meaningless death, with no supporting religious illusions of an afterlife, Gannoun's travellers discover the meaning of life in the raw, the miracle of breathing in and breathing out, and see death, the process of progressive rotting and disintegration, as an obscenity, a shameful desecration of the body -- nature's most valued gift to humanity. When one of the actors finally declares that no cause whatever is worth the sacrifice of a single human life, his statement is validated in the eyes of the audience by the overpowering vitality, marvellous beauty and versatile eloquence of the actors' spiritually-charged and energized physical presence. Structurally, Hostages, for which Leila Toubal, a veteran actress and old member of Gannoun's company, provided the idea and spoken text, develops by way of a push-pull dynamic which governs and orchestrates the relationship of the actors to each other and to the audience. On the level of the actors' interaction with each other, it alternately generates sympathy and aggression, solidarity and conflict -- mental states which are verbally interpreted into a constant swing from heated dialogic exchanges to lyrical monologues and from profound pathos to broad comedy. Visually, the same mechanism is at work producing cunningly-designed movement patterns which repeatedly draw the characters closely together, even to the point of piling them up on top of each other in what pathetically looks like a mound of lifeless human flesh, then scatter them far apart, enclosing each in a small, isolated circle of light. Indeed, in the complete absence of sets and with the frugal reduction of props and accessories to the absolute minimum -- a couple of suitcases, some handbags, travelling coats and a mobile in the opening scene and six black bands to blindfold the actors later on -- Gannoun's ascetic lighting design, uniformly neutral in colour but varying in shape, scope and intensity, became a vital dramatic force -- a character in its own right. At moments it seemed to impel and control the actors' movements, to chase them like a menacing searchlight round the stage, to invade and bully them like a ruthless investigator, to hold them immobile in a pitiless grip, or, with the help of Gannoun's powerful sound effects and Rabee' Al-Zamouri's vibrant music, to inspire bouts of hysterical panic and frenzied fear. The push-pull mechanism which regulates the whole show in every aspect also orchestrates the audience response, carefully swinging it between the poles of Aristotelian empathy and Brechtian distanciation. Gannoun acknowledges his debt to both masters, adding Meyerhold's "biomechanics" and Grotowski's "poor theatre" as other potent sources of inspiration. While the influence of the great Russian and Polish directors is most evident in the spiritual and physical energy of Gannoun's actors, their superb fitness and stunning range of performing skills, Aristotle gave him a strong sense of form and an abiding respect for "plot" and Brecht taught him a healthy disrespect for "heroes" of any kind, a robust suspicion of absolutes and "grand causes" and, also, never to carry emotion to the point of total identification. Throughout the play, the actors seemed intent on bursting any emotional bubble as soon as it formed, rounding off a moving speech or a sad sequence with a droll remark or a ludicrous comment, or delivering sombre lines in a funny tone, or using physical movement to comically undercut them. It felt as if they were constantly taking us for a ride, one moment drawing us emotionally close to them and the next pushing us away from them and asking us to look at them objectively and ponder their and our predicament. In its visceral theatrical proposition of a deeply troubled argument in which historical necessity is deeply interlocked with the miracle of being, the sanctity of life and the survival instinct, and its austerely unsentimental, fair-minded presentation of both sides of the case while foregrounding the ordeal of making a choice, of making sense of the jumble of sensations, experiences, inherited literatures and avalanche of media messages the individual of our age is constantly bombarded with, Hotages is truly a play for today -- an urgently topical piece which opens out onto wider universal issues and explores them sensitively, tentatively, without taking sides or committing itself. As such, it is symptomatic of the confused, wavering, anxiety-riddled sensibility of today's citizens the world over. Yet, in its countering of the ideological uncertainty of its content with a firm, highly focused and technically exacting structure, its insistence on the lively, vital interaction of the material space and the physical entities that occupy it and its subtle transformation of the limitedly, definably material into the vastly, suggestively metaphorical, Hotages is also, typically, a Gannoun work. Here The human body becomes the site where conflicting definitions of terrorism are fought out and the story is inscribed on the bodies of a tortured, bewildered heap of humanity; within the harshly restricted space of the prison cell, the human bodies which temporarily inhabit it become the real setting of the action, the memorials on which the consequences of the march of history are deeply etched. Ultimately, Hostages comes across as a celebration of life at the moment of death and of the human body at the apex of its futile, senseless suffering and degradation -- both as an elegy and a defiant song of affirmation.
